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Microsoft in the crosshairs of Brussels due to Microsoft Teams

TO European Comission opened an investigation into US technology Microsoft for alleged anti-competitive and anti-competitive practices carried out in its offer of the Microsoft Teams.

Brussels fears that this “offer” from Microsoft is a real imposition with its work tools, especially with its 365, the spiritual heir of the microsoft office.

Present in the range of work applications that until recently made up the Microsoft Office portfolio, later Office 365 now has the Redmond giant’s Microsoft 365 service. There we have the most popular productivity programs or apps like Word, Excell, PowerPoint, among other tools like Teams.

Microsoft may be abusing competition rules in Europe

Microsoft Teams Office

Specifically, the latter is dedicated to remote meetings, video conferences or video calls so popular in the modern work environment and the current job landscape.

However, Brussels believes that the American company is “pressuring” or simply forcing the use of this tool -Microsoft Teams- integrated into Microsoft 365.

So much so that, as colleagues in the publication TechCrunchthe European Union opened an antitrust investigation against Microsoft itself.

The crux of the matter, the reason for this investigation, is indeed related to the imposition of the use of the Teams platform for Office users.

The European Commission opened an official investigation into Microsoft

Microsoft in the EU antitrust sights on Teams and Office typing pic.twitter.com/1D9IzgAiZj

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 27, 2023

The news agency also advances Reuters that the creator of Windows has infringed the competition rules in force in the European Union.

More specifically, by linking and grouping their product sets into a single package, thus encouraging the use of proprietary solutions to the detriment of possible alternatives.

At stake are the current productivity tools and services integrated into its popular suites for companies like Office 365 and Microsoft 365 itself.

The announcement of the opening of the investigation was made by the European Commission itself through its official blog. There, the European regulator comes to express its concern about this practice by the North American technology company.

“The Commission is concerned that Microsoft is abusing and defending its market position in productivity software by restricting competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) for communication and collaboration products.”

The prevalence of Microsoft Teams worries the European Commission

In other words, by delivering a suite room complete set of work tools, Microsoft may be depriving the user of experimenting, investigating or even looking for other solutions.

It should be noted, however, that at the moment we cannot draw any conclusions from this other than the opening of the investigation.

We have opened a formal investigation to assess whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by bundling or bundling its Teams communication and collaboration product with its popular Office 365 and Microsoft 365 business suites ↓

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) July 27, 2023

“In particular, the Commission fears that Microsoft could give Teams an advantage in distributing the product by denying customers the opportunity to include opt-out of this product when they adhere to the suites productivity Something that may be limiting interoperability between your suites of work and productivity with competitive offers.”

In other words, the European legislator fears that the user of Microsoft work tools will have no choice but to use Teams. The fact of not having the possibility of not including this new platform to the detriment of other offers.

Google went through the same scrutiny with its Android

By the way, we remember that Google also underwent a similar investigation. As a result, the search giant started giving Android smartphone users the option to select the default search engine on their mobile devices.

In practice, when configuring a new Android device -smartphone or tablet- we have to choose the one we want to use from a list of various search engines. There, in addition to the Google search engine, we have several offers from the competition.

Finally, it should be noted that this investigation began approximately two years after the Loose, one of the main competitors of Teams, has denounced the situation to the European Union. Now, it only remains to wait for the course of the investigations and their conclusions.

#EUAntitrust Commission 🇪🇺 opens investigation into possible anti-competitive practices of Microsoft with respect to Teams 💻🗣️ 👇🔗➡️ pic.twitter.com/JdS28SwPxV

— EU Competition (@EU_Competition) July 27, 2023

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